Immersive Reality (IR)

Starting as an immersive theatre experience, Andrew Jamieson’s Lethal and Young originally invited the audience into the performance space, a small loft in the center of Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood. The chaotic and emotional story, the breakup of a long-term relationship, tore through the space, causing audience members to either avoid or approach the unstable action, allowing them each to have a distinctly unique experience based on their perspective.

At the time of its inception, Andrew was beginning life-altering research into Metamodernism.  In 2017, his need to experiment with the concepts he was exploring led him back to the Lethal and Young performances, which were workshopped in Montreal and Toronto in 2016. There was more to do. Andrew Jamieson’s Who’s Afraid first workshopped in 2017 in Andrew’s own loft. The most conventional elements of live storytelling, the “theatre” of the piece, were carefully removed, and replaced with experimental concepts of storytelling, of reality building, of removing the framing of exhibition, all drawn from Andrew’s research of Metamodernism.  Andrew found success in attempting to diminish, or eliminate, boundaries between audience and performance, submerging the audience into a new, discrete reality, one they were very much a part of.  Every element of the world was tangible, could be interacted with and pushed the audience to question how they existed within this world, one separate and discrete yet similar in many ways to their own.  They were encouraged to examine and explore every inch of the space to expand their understanding of the story and the performers, and their interactions with the characters influenced the tone and direction of the piece. 

By the official premiere of Andrew Jamieson’s Who’s Afraid in 2018, Andrew had begun to describe this experimental work as “Immersive Reality”, referring to it colloquially as “IR”.